


Stories for Winter and Spring/Tales of Skies and Stars

by apollos



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Family, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 08:36:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11710752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: Sarada and the eternal, never-ending love story of her parents.





	Stories for Winter and Spring/Tales of Skies and Stars

**Author's Note:**

> snuck a line from santa monica dream by angus and julius stone in here (kinda), recommended listening if you want those sweet sasusaku feels

It is snowing and quiet on their first date. Sakura has thought ahead and worn her coat and her mittens. Sasuke holds the door to her own apartment open for her after they return from dinner. As soon as he shuts it, his mouth is on hers, and he undoes the buttons on her coat slowly, painfully, one by one, until she is left shivering in the heated room. His hand, the real one, trembles at her hip when he presses his nose to her neck.  
“You smell good,” he says.

  
She flares and itches as if he had drawn hives to her surface with just his touch.

  
When she recounts the story to Sarada, she describes this all by saying, “Your father is a gentleman. A real gentleman. And you should never settle for anything less.” Most of the time she starts her stories here, in this moment, where Sasuke pushes both his arms inside of her coat and hugs her tight, his long, soft hair brushing her cheek. The silence and the still of this moment, and the way her heart beats in long, drawn-out shakes, and the itch and the fire on his breath.

  
And when Sarada is older, she tells her: she was not a virgin, though Sasuke was. And when Sarada asks her first, Sakura says: that’s not important, is it? Your father was the first in every way that counted. In Sakura’s heart, he is the first, and the last, and everything in between.

 

* * *

  
But still he leaves in the morning. And still when he talks, excuses fall out of his mouth and land at their feet, a wall that she must break through every time. Every time.

  
When Sarada lets the first boy touch her--a random, with a slick tongue and slick hair on a mission, in a corner of their inn while her teammates take too long in the hot springs--she thinks: where is the fire? And the itch? Where is the eternal tickle and flame to hold in her stomach, as her mother as told her again and again? It is fun when their tongues touch in the space between their breaths, and something flickers when his hand holds onto her thigh a little too tightly, but she does not feel as if she is being made and undone and made again. She does not think of this boy often in her life, and she struggles to recall his name to her own daughter, one day.

  
“I’m so happy you never had to experience heartbreak like I did,” her mother will say, her hair graying at the roots, caps of snow on cherry blossom trees in the weeks where winter meets spring. “You’ve grown up so well.”  
“Do you think I’ll need heartbreak to experience real love?” Sarada had asked to get this response.

  
A pause, and then Sakura adds: “No, I don’t think so.” It is a lie. They both know it. Sasuke’s portrait stares at them from the mantle while Sarada’s toddler children argue over a toy in the other room. How could she not have named them after her parents, the both of them, her twins that have developed the pink hair? The moons that have fallen from the sky? The living reincarnations?

 

* * *

  
Sasuke prepares a picnic to propose. Sakura is three months pregnant and though she has not told him, he knows. He knows it’s a girl. He can feel the energy, a small ball in her stomach, tightly wound and buzzing. He spends too long fixated on Sakura’s middle, and he knows she knows. Why had they not been more careful, he thinks to himself, hidden in a tree tracking an enemy, filthy and aching and missing her--them--so much he feels it in his own stomach, his own pregnancy? Sasuke has been careful all his life, and yet when it comes to this woman he has stashed in Konoha, his control is a boulder on a thin string of fishing line above a dark and stormy ocean. And now he has gone and he has left behind more of himself than just the billowing impression of a dark cloak turning over sand in a star-studded evening and the only thing that he has ever loved and been loved by in return.

  
The picnic is on their old training grounds. Sasuke has prepared all the food himself, packed it into neat bento boxes, organized by color and texture and taste. Exquisite. He stares at her, at her colors and her textures, and he knows her tastes, they are on his swollen, awkward tongue, and his heart is in his throat and he says before he can say anything else, “Marry me.”

  
“What?” Sakura pauses with chopsticks in her hand, a confused smile on her face.

  
Sarada will say: “That’s it? That’s how it happened?” and Sakura and Sasuke will both say that it was perfect, it was beautiful, it was everything, in that moment in the sunshine in the green of the grass and the feeling of the bandages on Sasuke’s bad hand as he reaches to brush a piece of hair from Sakura’s face and repeat it with a heavy seriousness almost somber in his eyes: “Marry me.”

* * *

  
Through all the weddings of her friends she attends, he is not there. He is somewhere, she is somewhere, he is nowhere, she is nowhere, and they are not together. She tells herself it is okay because they marry with just the moon as their witness, and she thinks of the night when he left her for the very first time, the way she slept on that bench not by choice but because her tears had glued her eyes shut. And though she wants to be honest with Sarada, she can’t help but leave this--and that--and other bits and pieces out. But her daughter is smart, so smart, smarter than the both of them, and she figures it out.

 

* * *

  
And when Sakura is old and grayed and dulled, and Sasuke’s death-portrait lurks on his rarely used side of the bed, Sarada says, “Mom, it’s okay. I believe you. I know you and Dad loved each other.”

  
“I was never trying to convince you,” Sakura says. “Sometimes you just want to hear yourself talk. Sometimes you want to make your life into more than it was.”

  
There is no use arguing with old women, but Sarada thinks: how could she say that? Her mother’s life--her father’s life--all of their lives, they are written and told and repeated over and over, they are on everybody’s tongue, they are living (they are dying) legends. They are books with words that move. And if Sarada loved her family less, she would tell this untold story, this story that folds in upon itself, the story of the red string tied in knots around the trees of Konoha and beyond. The story of how winter turns over into spring and there are always stars in the night sky and the string may tangle and knot but it will never break.

  
“I can’t wait to see him again,” Sakura says on her deathbed. “And that’s the story, isn’t it?”

  
“Yes, Mom,” Sarada says, tears in her eyes, thick and salty and sticking to her eyelashes. Her father’s eyelashes, fine and long and dark. “That’s the story.”


End file.
